CRS Seminar: Equally unequal: intersectional oppression and the equality claims of refugees and migrants in Canada

January 28, 2025

1:00-2:30pm (Toronto)

This is a hybrid event

In person: 626 Kaneff Tower, York University, Keele Campus

Virtually: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/71oNH9RcTXuGKmEjU4B0oA

Guest speaker: Sharry Aiken, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University

Abstract:

The intersecting, mutually reinforcing and structural dynamics of “race”, gender, class, and ableism are routinely erased by Canadian courts in their consideration of legal challenges to exclusionary immigration laws and border policies. From endorsing immigrant selection policies that categorially bar admission to immigrants with disabilities, the profiling of non-citizen security suspects, the denial of health care and subsidized child care to “non-status” migrant or refugee women, and the failure to even consider substantive equality in relation to detention policies, and the processing of asylum claims, judges have largely avoided naming or engaging with the compounding disadvantage faced by racialized, poor and disabled migrants and refugees. 

While distinctions between various categories of non-citizens have been found to run afoul of the Charter's equality guarantees, decades of test litigation have failed to disrupt the status-based, structural inequality between citizens and non-citizens embedded in Canadian law. Building on the foundational scholarship by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) and Shreya Atrey (2019) on intersectional discrimination and E. Tendayi Achiume on racial borders (2022), this paper will examine the theoretical and doctrinal anxieties that arise when the "rights to equal protection and benefit of the law" are translated and applied to the domain of Canadian refugee and border policies.

Bio:

Sharry Aiken is a law professor, academic director of a graduate diploma program on immigration law at Queen’s University and a longstanding external affiliate of CRS. Most of her teaching and research centres around migration and borders in the Canadian context. As an educator, her primary aim is to teach students how to work with the law while at the same time fostering an understanding of how the legal system itself is the source and anchor of injustice. Sharry practiced immigration and refugee law for ten years before her appointment to Queen’s, and continues to support strategic litigation on immigration issues through her role as co-chair the Canadian Council for Refugees Legal Affairs Committee. She lives in the Kensington Market neighbourhood of Toronto with her partner and two unruly dogs.